I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words and idiomatic systems of belief we find ourselves inhabiting.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius asserts a position that all we (can) ever lose is this current moment, as it is both the essence of experience and – to my mind – the necessary inflection by and through which knowledge or communication (and thought) are rendered intelligible. We lose the immediacy and there really is no “up side” for it, beyond the various industries and cultural narratives that sediment around vital as a factvof our lives.
It never ceases to amaze me that pretty much ever narrative artefact, entity and system directed towards the interpretation of mortality is grounded in a meaning and significance that can only ever be as consequential as it shown implicit uncertainties allow. The presence of absence is the ground upon which all meaning and significance grows. If we did not die, life would be rendered doubly meaningless by a philosophy (or any other system of belief) that is useful and valuable only as long as it might be reasonably portrayed as antithetical to its own opposite.
We come to depend upon the metaphysically inaccessible concepts that bound our lives and, in rounding this journey with a little sleep at each end, inflate a certain feeling of irreducible absurdity to this messy, improvisational human game of purpose and chance.
Daedelus Kite 